Give the Gift of Wolf-Pelt

Tex Avery had Christmas scenes in several of his cartoons (A Gander at Mother Goose, Holiday Highlights), and an appearance by Santa Claus in another (Who Killed Who?), but he really only made one Christmas cartoon—One Ham’s Family at MGM (1943).

Being a Christmas cartoon, it was naturally released on August 14 (though it played starting August 12 at Loew’s Harrisburg).

The end gag is familiar animated cartoon material with Avery’s little stamp. The mean widdle pig has had an off-screen fight with the wolf that wants to eat him. In the wind-up, the kid hands his mom a Christmas present. A fur!



A turn reveals the source of the fur—the wolf.



“Why, this coat is just what I need,” says mama pig. The wolf reaches into the scene. “You and me, both, sister!”



The wolf gallops away, the cartoon ending with a typical Avery sign.



I prefer the version in Swing Shift Cinderella (1945) when the stalk of corn pops up.

Rich Hogan is Avery’s gag man here, with animation credited to Preston Blair, Ray Abrams and Ed Love.

The star of the cartoon is Kent Rogers, doing Red Skelton’s jerk kid character, the Gildersleeve wolf (no, Wikipedia, that’s not his name) and the narrator, with Sara Berner as mama pig and Pinto Colvig sounding closer to Andy Devine than Disney’s Practical Pig in this one.

Loads of Christmas Cheer

Three directors at Warner Bros. had a crack at making a cartoon with Cecil Turtle outsmarting Bugs Bunny. They all have a different tone, but they’re all good.

The final one was Rabbit Transit, directed by Friz Freleng. Mike Maltese and/or Tedd Pierce fit in an incongruous Christmas reference. Bugs is racing along when a postman (with Mel Blanc’s Happy Postman voice from the Burns and Allen radio show) pulls up and hands him a letter.



Yes, the turtle has beat him to Chicago. A few emotional drawings of Bugs.

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Then the Christmas gag.



As Carl Stalling plays “Jingle Bells,” Bugs realises what he can give Cecil as a return present.



Of course, it’s not Christmas at all. Cecil’s just heckling Bugs. Cut to the next scene where Cecil is in Chicago in very un-December-like weather. Because Cecil and Bugs are still supposedly racing, Stalling puts “Time Waits For No One” in the background.



And the present?



Freleng’s 1947 animation crew of Virgil Ross, Ken Champin, Gerry Chiniquy and Manny Perez are credited. The backgrounds don’t look like Paul Julian’s. It’s because they’re not. Phil De Guard was bouncing between the Davis and Freleng units around this time and he painted the settings in this cartoon.

Santa Claus Meets Gene Deitch

Gene Deitch wasn’t very happy with me.

I dislike Deitch’s Tom and Jerry cartoons. The stories meander, the music sounds like it was made in a tunnel, and the layouts are so awkward that you can barely see Jerry sometimes. Then there’s the stiff animation. And the weird sound effects.

For ages, Gene made excuses for how poor they were. Then something happened. Some animation fans, perhaps feeling sorry for them, or out of respect for Mr. Deitch, yapped endlessly on-line about their greatness. After that, Gene started to believe his own press clippings, so to speak, and got defensive about any criticism of the cartoons. Including my criticism. “If they’re so bad, why are they on DVD?” he asked me. Well, Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch is on DVD, too. Release on home video is not quite an acid test of quality.

There are things Gene invented which I like. I enjoy Sidney the Elephant. The Juggler of Our Lady is a fine, serious cartoon. I watched Tom Terrific when I was little; all kids, I’ll bet, loved the almost comatose Manfred the Wonder Dog and Tom turning into all kinds of things.

So allow me to give you the Christmas present of Gene Deitch. Tom Terrific had a prototype, an heroic kid character in a comic strip. Terr’ble Thompson appeared in newspapers in 1955-56. If nothing else, it has Gene’s stylistic stamp. The strip was in serial format (like Tom Terrific), with the “episodes” tied together with a frame or two and some dialogue. Terr’ble was involved in a Christmas adventure, which we post below. The comics start on December 13, 1955 and end on December 28th. We include comics from Sunday colour sections.

Note: After clipping all the comics from a newspaper, correcting the colour balance, uploading them and HTML coding the post, I discovered they are already on-line, minus the United Features Syndicate copyright notice. So, we have substituted these cleaner, web-site versions instead.



Deitch was on the move. Long gone from UPA, by March 1956 he had left John Hubley’s Storyboard, Inc. and accepted a job with Robert Lawrence Productions. The strip came to an end on Sunday, April 15th. In June, Deitch was hired by Terrytoons as its creative supervisor. He admitted a full-time job plus a full-time comic strip was hurting his family life.

50 years after T.T. vanished from newspapers, someone decided a product from the mind of Gene Deitch must be re-examined. In 2006, Fantagraphics reprinted the strips in a book, including the Sunday editions in full colour (digitised in some cases due to the washed-out quality of the Ben-Day dots on newsprint). You can see the book at this site. Gene and his son Kim talk about the strip. Best of all, there’s not a Dicky Moe or Landing Stripling to be found.

Tralfaz Wednesday Theatre: Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen

Some Christmas specials are television evergreens—A Charlie Brown Christmas, Alastair Sim’s version of A Christmas Carol, that one about the kid getting his eye shot out. Doubtless you can name others you annually look forward to once a year.

Then there are others that don’t quite make it.

One was produced a man known for screechy and preachy 1950s films about a world filled with child molesters, addicted teenagers, mangled bodies caused by car crashes, and general mayhem and violence.

Sid Davis was John Wayne’s stand-in. He hit up the Duke for $1,000 to film the beware-of-perverted-strangers opus The Dangerous Stranger, designed to be shown in schools and by civic groups. It was available for purchase in January 1950. The money rolled in and Davis made a nice career feeding on the paranoid side of the decade.

But before he got in the strident mental hygiene film business, he produced a Christmas film. It looks like Wayne financed this one, too. In true Sid Davis fashion, it is bizarre.

Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen was written and choreographed by Robert Niel Porter, a Springfield, Missouri native who was a 1942 graduate of Santa Cruz High School, where he starred in the play “The Ghost Flies South.” After serving in the navy in the South Pacific in World War Two, he established a children’s theatre, producing his own plays, and had written and directed 40 children’s shows on television in Los Angeles¹. Porter and a former chorus boy and singer named Jack Perry collaborated on musicals and other shows for a number of years. He also appeared in several feature films, and perhaps it is there he met up with Davis. Porter appeared in Queen as a toy soldier, billed as “Bob Porter.” He died Aug. 28, 2005².

Porter copyrighted Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen as a one-act play on January 7, 1949, which had been performed at the Assistance League Playhouse in Los Angeles the previous December 21st. The film version was made that year as there was a showing at the Budlong Avenue P-TA on December 15, 1949³, though it wasn’t copyrighted until 1951. That year, Queen was picked up a number of television stations for Christmas-time broadcast, including WENR-TV in Chicago, WATV in Newark, WTAR in Norfolk, Va. and WBRC-TV in Birmingham.

The film was distributed by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films which eventually made it part of a four-programme package for television distribution; in 1956, it was through Trans-Lux Television⁴, the same people who brought you the made-for-TV Felix the Cat cartoons. Queen was a minor success. At least 35 stations bought the package⁵; WVET in Rochester purchased the colour negative for a three-year period⁶.

The question is “why”? Maybe the answer was “desperation.” Even Felix’s magic bag of tricks wouldn’t be able to turn this from being a steaming pile of “what the....” The show opens with a “brownie” named Snoopy who twirls and swirls for no particular reason, talks down to the viewers and continually whinnies like a horse (it’s supposed to be laughter).

The embarrassing performance comes from stage and TV actress Rocky Stanton, who grew up in Phoenix as Rochelle Costanten. In early 1950, she went from a brownie to a pixie as she was hired as “Miss Pixie” for KECA-TV’s “Sleepy Joe” show⁷ and played Gleeper on the “Mr. Do Good” (formerly “Santa’s Workshop”) children’s show, originally on KTSL⁸. She later, as Rocky Rau, became resident director of the Ana-Modjeska Players in Anaheim and passed away on April 10, 2003 at age 78.

Santa is played by Edmund Penny, a USC grad and World War Two vet who appeared on Dr. Christian on radio, and wrote and produced plays. The other title role, with some kind of off-and-on accent, is enacted by Margot Von Leu, about whom I can find nothing and my guess is her last name is a contraction. And Audrey Washburn (baby doll) was a dancer and the older sister of actress Beverly Washburn, who appeared with Jack Benny on radio and TV and is still with us today.

Anyway, enough of the background. See how much of this you can take. I can’t get past the first few minutes. I recommend you watch Davis’ Keep off the Grass or The Bottle and the Throttle for its pro-police messages. The Duke would be proud.

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1 Santa Cruz Sentinel, Oct. 27, 1973, pg. 25^↩
2 Los Angeles Times, Aug. 31, 2005, pg. B11^↩
3 The Southwest Wave, Los Angeles, Dec. 15, 1949, pg. 33^↩
4 The Billboard, Nov. 10, 1956, pg. 9^↩
5 Broadcasting, Dec. 25, 1956, ph. 48^↩
6 Variety, Dec. 5, 1956, pg. 54^↩
7 Los Angeles Evening Citizen, Jan. 23, 1950, pg. 18^↩
8 Los Angeles Mirror, July 28, 1949, pg. 35^↩

Twirling Edible Leg

Woody Woodpecker pretends to be Santa (70 days before Christmas, according to the calendar) in an attempt to chow down on the food at Wally Walrus’ ski lodge in Ski For Two (1944).

In one scene, Woody gets ready to munch on a turkey leg. The frames tell the story. I like how the leg becomes a swirl of lines.



What I don’t like is the horrendous DNR in DVD set of Woody cartoons put out some years ago. It’s great to have them available, but there’s no excuse for the frame below.



Santa needed to give someone some video restoration lessons for Christmas.

Don Williams and Grim Natwick are the credited animators for director Shamus Culhane.